


Puella Magi Natasha Magica

by Melime



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Girls, Gen, Mash-up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 15:51:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5592160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her wish was simple, to survive that place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Puella Magi Natasha Magica

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Português brasileiro available: [Puella Magi Natasha Magica](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5592169) by [Melime GreenLeaf (Melime)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Melime/pseuds/Melime%20GreenLeaf)



> I had written this for the Random crossover … or maybe not so random after all challenge (prompt by anon: black soul, Natasha as a magic girl in the Madoka Magica universe) a few months ago, but then I never posted because I'm not really about the whole "forever anonymous" thing. However, I didn't want to throw this away either so I'm going to post this. If the challenge is ever edited to have a reveal date, I'll add the credit to the prompt here.

She looked like a child, but didn’t feel like one. Anything as naïve and joyful as a childhood was taken from her a long time ago. Sometimes she thought she could remember how things were before, but she couldn’t trust those memories, they were probably lies, either fed to her or created by herself as a form of comfort. She didn’t need comfort, to need anything was a weakness, and she wasn’t weak. They killed the weak links, not their handlers, the girls killed among themselves. It was their training, they were getting used to take lives as if it was nothing of consequence, but they were also learning how not to get attached. Sleep together, bathe together, study together, train together, be ready to kill any of them, be ready for them to try to kill you.

She kept forgetting the other girls. She didn’t mean to, although it wasn’t a flaw. The others were failures that were discarded as the failed experiments they were, they didn’t deserve a memory. None of them did, it was part of being a cultivated weapon. They looked so alike, and were trained to speak and move as one, a mass-produced asset. They didn’t have the right to be individuals, to have unique thoughts, to leave a mark. And yet, she wished she could remember them, as much as she could wish for anything. She didn’t know how she would feel if she could remember the faces of all the girls she killed, she didn’t even know if she would feel anything. Maybe that was the point.

She sometimes wondered if she was born in the Red Room or taken there to be trained. It was a game of sorts, although she wouldn’t call it that, because games were forbidden unless they were part of the training. She liked to come up with different backstories, not caring especially if any of them were true. She was taken from her mother; they had to shoot her to take her daughter from her arms. She was bred specifically for the program. She was a foreign princess stolen from her crib. She was a nationalist that had volunteered by her own volition. She was a spy implanted there to destroy the Red Room. It was something interesting to do, although she wouldn’t call it fun, she never called anything fun, wasn’t even sure if she knew the meaning of the word.

She first saw the creature one night, past bedtime. Her wrist was hurt during training, and the handcuffs were bothering her in a way they never had before. She had kept her eyes shut, didn’t want to be punished for being awake, but the strange laughter caught her attention. It was a small white animal, one she didn’t recognize despite her zoology studies. It didn’t talk to her that night, nor the next few it showed there. It passed through the girls, changing them one by one. She could see the difference in the way they fought, how hard it was getting to defeat them, how brutal their fights were. There was something else too, something she couldn’t quite understand. When they fought, things that didn’t make sense happened

She never had a choice, not until then. In a way, having a choice was harder to believe than the existence of magic. Her wish was simple, to survive that place. Years later, she would wonder if all the survivors had made deals, traded away their souls for the chance of having agency just once. The choice was more important than the wish, so she never asked what the others had wished for, all she needed to know was that they were also magic girls, and as such were even more dangerous than they were being trained to be. She had her powers for only four days when the first one fell to despair. The witch was born in the middle of the night, and killed many of their handlers before anyone could stop it. She was the one that destroyed it, and had to kill two other girls to get the grief seed. She was smart, she had made the connection between the darkening of the soul gems and the witch transformation, and she was determinate to survive, she wouldn’t die as a witch.

Kyubey told her the truth, when she asked it the right way. It commended her for not being as disturbed as the other girls usually were. She never told it, but she didn’t feel bad about being used. At least it was honest about this, and both gave her in return and allowed this to be her choice. It was her own fault if she took that deal. Back then, she didn’t mind, only much later she would wonder about what it meant to sell her soul.

Being disconnected from her body made some things easier. It still hurt, she never asked Kyubey to take away the pain, she knew it could be useful as a way to focus and to prevent her from taking unnecessary risks. Still, knowing that her body wasn’t home to her soul anymore, just a mean to protect her soul gem, was a relief. She could use it as an asset any way it was needed, and when it was necessary she would tell herself whatever had happened, happened only to a shell, not really to her. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes, it just made her feel less than human, and sometimes, that helped too.

After some time, she stopped aging. She wasn’t sure if it was a consequence of her deal or of what was done to her in the Red Room, and she didn’t much care to discover. It would be nearly impossible, anyway; she didn’t know any other Red Room survivors apart from the ones that made deals, and she never saw a magic girl besides them survive much past her teenage years. Decades passed by, and she remained the same on the outside, while growing old and wise in the inside. She wanted to change, and one day the opportunity presented itself. She met Clint, and it was the second time in her life she was given a choice, but he asked for nothing in return.

She never told him, nor anyone at SHIELD, but that didn’t mean she was the only one there. It only took one glance for her and Agent Hill to know they were the same, and although she feared the outcome, she found in Maria a good friend. Maria helped her use SHIELD’s resources to find witches, so she would never run out of grief seeds. For the first time in her life, she found contentment. Then came the Avengers, aliens falling from the sky, and the fall of SHIELD. The world rapidly became a land where magic was commonplace and heroes were often something more or something less than human. Maybe one day she would get to a point where she could tell her team the truth, and by virtue of their own uniqueness they wouldn’t judge her as a monster for selling her soul. She wasn’t sure she could trust them just yet, maybe one day.


End file.
